I really like nature. I feel somehow more complete, more alive, more connected to the universe of everything beautiful and growing and teeming with such a tenuous but persistent life when I’m surrounded by flora. Which leaves me slightly unrequited, as my apartment has a single plant clinging to dear life. I say plant, because I’m not sure what it is. It’s never flowered, never grown, and gives little indication as to its genus. It seems to exist in a perpetual state of flora purgatory, with ever present brown chipping away at its edges, but never dying. I’m not sure if it shows the true tenacity of life, or the depressing fight for survival that is existence. Or maybe it’s just a fucking plant. I give it a bit of alcohol every week or so, just to make sure my plant is on a similar plane of existence as me. It would bum me out if I had a beautiful flowering behemoth which somehow grew more magnificent while I drank myself to a state I’m willing to eat clearly expired food. Relativity is a bitch. I remember one of those. I meant the plant, not the bitch. Carl was probably the bitchiest person alive. He baby sat my sister and I and would eat our Oreos because he wasn’t allowed to have them at home. My sister transcends the word, obliterating it. Like trying to describe a mass genocide as “unfortunate”. Wait. Plants. I went on a camping trip with some boy scouts. When I was a kid. We wandered through the forest a few feet from the road and pretended we were at once one with and conquering nature. Though the s’mores were good. And I remember lying on my back in a small grove of redwoods, wondering if there was more to existence than consciousness. Feeling at once alien to and bonded with the trees. And now I have a plant. My apartment hallways have fake plants strewn about, which is a damned more depressing than nothing at all. Like a mausoleum for the idea of escaping this shit hole. My plant’s name is sometimes Len. And sometimes Grace. Because why the fuck not?